How to run a LinkedIn Ads Account Audit

At Tuned Social, we regularly audit LinkedIn ad accounts spending anywhere between $5K and $50K+ per month. Over the years, we’ve refined our approach to focus on three critical areas that determine the success of your campaigns:

1. Audience + Targeting
2. Creative + Copy Strategy
3. Account Technical Setup

Here’s a breakdown of how we approach each of these pillars:

1. Audience + Targeting

We always start here because:

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“If your audience is wrong, then everything else is wrong.”

There are two key components to this:

1. Strategic Targeting: Are you focusing on the right people?
2. Tactical Execution: Is your targeting configured correctly to reach them?

When I worked at LinkedIn, we used an internal tool called Supertitles which was essentially a map of how LinkedIn’s targeting options connected. While we no longer have access to this tool, our years of experience have taught us how to spot where accounts go off track.

Today, we leverage LinkedIn’s ‘Companies Tab’ feature to analyse all the industries and companies you’re reaching, across both paid and organic impressions.

To take things further, we connect your account to advanced audience reporting tools like Windsor.ai and Looker. This allows us to create custom dashboards and analyse data beyond Campaign Manager’s 25-row limitation. With these insights, we can rank:

• All job titles reached and engaged.
• All companies reached and engaged.

This process helps us refine your audience by excluding irrelevant titles and companies, reallocating budgets to prevent larger segments from dominating spend, and ensuring your targeting is as efficient as possible.

2. Creative + Copy Strategy

Once we’ve ensured the right audience is in place, we turn our attention to creative.

Why?

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“Great creative beats great optimisation.”

LinkedIn rewards high-performing ads with better reach and lower costs. Strong creative can dramatically improve your click-through rates (CTR) and engagement rates, which, in turn, leads to cheaper, more impactful results - even with default and unoptimised bidding strategies and settings.

Here’s what we assess and offer suggestions on:

• Concepts: How well are your USPs and audience pain points visualised?
• Formatting: Are your ad formats optimised for LinkedIn’s best practices?
• Clarity: Is your message clear and immediately understood?
• CTAs: Are your calls-to-action bold, clear, and action-oriented?
• Copy: Does your copy deliver the core value before the character cut-off?
• Ad Types: Are you using the formats that are performing best right now?

By refining these elements, we help ensure your creative works hard for you, capturing attention and driving meaningful action.

3. Account Technical Setup

Finally, we dive into the technical side. This is where we uncover missed opportunities and advanced optimisation strategies that can elevate your campaigns.

Our process includes identifying all the “don’ts” in your setup while introducing the “do’s” to bring your campaigns to the next level.

We also enhance LinkedIn’s native functionality with 3rd-party tools like Linklo.io, ChatGPT, and other integrations to execute advanced tasks such as:

• Scheduling: Improving ad timing and relevance.
• Budget Capping: Maintaining control over spend at granular levels.
• Custom CPC/CPL Analysis: Building deeper insights into cost metrics.

These tools give us the flexibility to address gaps that LinkedIn alone can’t solve, ensuring your account operates smoothly.

Ready for a Second Opinion?

If your LinkedIn ad account is spending $5K+ per month and you want a second pair of eyes on your setup, book some time here. Our audits are designed to uncover inefficiencies, optimise performance, and set your campaigns up for long-term success.

Let’s chat and see how we can help.

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